judicial cognisance, and for many years after a standing court was
established for the trial of extortion no similar tribunal was thought
necessary for the crime of peculation.[115] Apart from the long,
tortuous and ineffective trial of the Scipios,[116] no question of the
kind is known to have been raised since Manius Acilius Glabrio, the
conqueror of Antiochus and the Aetolians, competed for the censorship.
Then a story, based on the existence of the indubitable wealth which he
was employing with a lavish hand to win the favour of the people, was
raked up against him by some jealous members of the nobility. It was
professed that some money and booty, found in the camp of the king, had
never been exhibited in the triumph nor deposited in the treasury. The
evidence of legates and military tribunes was invited, and Cato, himself
a competitor for the censorship, was ready to testify that gold and
silver vases, which he had seen in the captured camp, had not been
visible in the triumphal procession. Glabrio waived his candidature, but
the people were unwilling to convict and the prosecution was
abandoned.[117] Here again we are confronted by the old temptation of
curio-hunting, which, the nobility deemed indecent in so "new" a man as
Glabrio; the evidence of Cato--the only testimony which proved
dangerous--did not establish the charge that money due to the State had
been intercepted by a Roman consul.

But the regard for the property of the State was unfortunately not
extended to the property of its clients. Even before the provinces had
yielded a prey rendered easy by distance and irresponsibility, Italian
cities had been forced to complain of the violence and rapacity of Roman
commanders quartered in their neighbourhood,[118] and the passive
silence with which the Praenestines bore the immoderate requisitions of
a consul, was a fatal guarantee of impunity which threatened to alter
for ever the relations of these free allies to the protecting